An automatic painting. Tranced out, I identified with both figures. But it beats me why I (as the girl on the left) was so outraged about the gift of a perfectly nice levitating flower. And as her animal familiar (on the right) I thought she'd like it... Nope. Whack!

I felt so hurt and sorry for myself (whichever self I was) that I had to add the soul of Elvis behind us, conducting Heartbreak Hotel as background music... poor, poor me!

I found the painting quite puzzling when it was done. But...

...I spent the ensuing year freaking out from (un)buried memories of battering. Now I think the flower may stand for those memories--and the picture, painted mostly from instinct not logic, may have been warning me I was less ready than I thought to handle the gift of old pain, old memory, that my body had carried so long.

A NOTE FOR DREAMERS, ON THE... CREATURE

She's a recurring figure in my dreams; her name's Silky. She often appears as a black cat, a horse, or this species, a highly intelligent being called a krelkin.

Elvis, to my eternal embarrassment, also recurs in my dreams, though (thank the gods of Memphis) not nearly as often. Since he's usually the fat Elvis.

A NOTE FOR ARTISTS

This is a very compressed JPEG version. Click it to see what I originally painted--a big GIF (458K). But the GIF format doesn't fully explain the strange textures. This was my first painting on a new computer and I reveled in the extra colors (256 seemed infinite after 16!) and all that elbow-RAM. Like most of my digital paintings from that time, it's NOT done in Photoshop but a program called Deluxepaint. You can paint from scratch in Photoshop but it channels you toward, well, a Photoshop look--makes some effects tedious and others too damn easy. Serious artists should use at least one other program that feels very different. Sorry, I don't mean to preach! But it's true. Photoshop is a velvet cage cushioning you from reality, like suburbia, or the Demoblican Party.